AFA's 2008 Air Warfare Symposium Transcripts

Combat Air Forces Strategic Plan and Recapitalization


General John D.W. Corley
Commander, Air Combat Command
AFA Air Warfare Symposium
Orlando, FL
February 21, 2008

Moderator: I would like to introduce our first speaker. He’s responsible for organizing, training and equipping and maintaining combat ready forces for rapid deployment and employment, ensuring strategic air defense forces are ready to meet the challenges of peacetime air sovereignty and wartime defense. He’s a command pilot with more than 3,000 hours.

Please welcome to our stage the Commander of Air Combat Command, General John Conan Corley.

[Applause].

General Corley: Mike, thank you. Gracious introduction. Thanks to all the members of AFA, especially those that allow me to participate in this great symposium.

I’d like to also say thank you to all of the industry leaders, the military leaders, friends and colleagues that are out there, thanks specifically for your service to our great country. We do this collectively and we do this in a magnificent fashion so my first words are thank you.

My second words may be somewhat brief. I was asked based on recent events to submit my script for security and policy review to the building. I’ve looked at what has been redacted from my script and I’m left with only two words: good morning. [Laughter]. All numbers have also been excised from my script, so I will not be referring to any numbers while I’m up here from the stage this morning.

Look, the theme that has been chosen I think is more appropriate, it’s poignant, especially for this particular group. Air dominance yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Air dominance. It is something we have always pursued, it is something that as long as we have an AFA and an Air Force will continue to place the highest priority on achieving. Our nation depends on that. The importance placed on air dominance, in my mind, can be traced to the earliest advocates of air power as I try to look at this theme of yesterday and moving forward, all the way to tomorrow.

Gulio Duhet asserted, and I’m going to quote again for you, you need to be reminded of this history lesson. In order to assure an adequate national defense, it’s necessary to be in a position -- what kind of a position? -- to conquer the command of the air. And so began the primacy of air power, in my mind, and air dominance at its core.

Early disciples, you know their names. When you think through individuals like Mitchell, Floy, Spaatz, Kennedy, all had an interesting attribute. It’s an attribute that Hap Arnold referred to as “air mindedness.” It really characterized in his mind and in mine, a particular expertise and a distinct point of view.

The fact is, for all of us in this audience, we are airmen and the fact is we think differently than others, who also rise up to fight and to defend this great nation, but we think differently. Our doctrine codifies this. It essentially says this airman’s perspective is quote “necessarily different”, it reflects range, it reflects speed, it reflects the capabilities of an aerospace force.

We think in terms of operating from and owning the high ground; we always have and will in the future. We think about operating from a position of strength. We aren’t tethered in terms of time or geography or distance. We have vision and we look beyond the horizon.

This is not in my mind to say that our perspective is better, it’s just different, it’s useful, it’s airman like, it’s not condescending, but it’s different in a very meaningful way and we have to understand that yesterday piece of air dominance to help guide us in terms of where we’re going in the future.

The importance of air dominance born out of the crucible of conflict, born out of our past, when you think back to operations like Torch during World War II where Eisenhower was able to witness firsthand the turning point of the North African campaign as allies destroyed Rommel’s ground forces, to the grave consequences of when we have not established and maintained air dominance. Schweinfurt, 1943. When you launch 290 B-17 bombers, one of which was my dad, and 181 of them either don’t come home or come home so battle damaged they may never fly again.

Air dominance. Early missions, early lessons, illustrative of the importance, the enduring importance, if you will, of air dominance. Airmen look at the hard earned lessons of previous wars and current wars and try to take those lessons from areas like World War II and put them to heart from an airman’s perspective, and again, we’ve done that and no U.S. ground forces have been attacked from the air since 1953. You know this.

Our ability, really, to provide global vigilance, global reach, and especially from my perspective, global power to combatant commanders predicated on the continued ability to own the skies. Air dominance. It is a strategic imperative. It is fundamental to any military strategy. It saves lives, it directly impacts the length of the conflict, as well as the quality of the subsequent peace. It helps accomplish our national and our military objectives.

Air dominance. It assures friendly forces. It gives freedom from attack and gives freedom to attack when and where we choose. Our ability to achieve this air dominance therefore depends on overmatch. We must possess and maintain overmatch and I would argue that today that’s becoming increasingly at risk. Overmatch both in capability and in capacity, that’s what the combat air force must do and continue to do today and into the future.

So let’s look at the capability piece for just a few brief moments. First, air dominance requires us to have unrivaled capabilities and over the years our potential adversaries increasingly have become to challenge that. They understand our employment of air power as an asymmetric advantage, and as such, potential adversaries have begun to develop and increasingly develop programs specifically to counter our nation’s asymmetric advantage, one that is yielded through air dominance.

Today, decades old, decades old F-15s, F-16s are now overmatched by newer operational fighters. Russia, Chinese, for example, F-11Bs. Adversaries and technology are exploited by our potential adversaries. They pose a significant risk to air dominance and they pose a risk to our nation. The once dominant, if you will, advantage possessed by our on average 25-plus year old F-15s and 22-plus year old F-16s is very much marginalized by adversaries’ air forces of increasingly capable forces that average but six years of age.

These threats demand that legacy fighters are now flying more aggressive tactics, simply to survive in this kind of an environment, additional stresses on aging and geriatric fleets of airplanes. Additionally, the development of the proliferation of advanced surface-to-air missiles -- SA-10s, SA-12s, SA-20s -- compound the threat we face today. Weapon systems that have expanded a threat envelope and have strength in several countries’ air defenses. Advanced surface-to-air threat has been able to engage legacy fighters at increasing ranges beyond our ability to hold their targets at risk. We can’t allow a veiled curtain to be put around targets and not be able to provide our nation and our President options.

The complimentary air-to-air and surface-to-air capabilities inherent in these modern integrated air defense systems put our legacy aircraft at risk. We no longer can dictate the time and place and the tempo of modern air warfare. Whether it’s one on one engagement or the overall campaign, anything less than air dominance puts our joint and coalition force at risk. The sophistication, the diversity, and the proliferation of those threats that are out there and increasingly being populated around the globe are putting air dominance in doubt for today. Our capabilities must be able to counter and overcome those threats. It’s not just the capability, it’s the capacity to yield the sufficiency that we need to obtain and maintain air dominance.

So let’s think about that capacity piece for just a few moments. Air dominance requires us to have an appropriately capable fleet, but it must be an appropriately capable fleet fielded with the appropriate capacity. A thousand times we’ve heard the cliché but it’s worth repeating, quantity does have a quality all its own. And since the demise of the Soviet Union we’ve dramatically curtailed our force structure.

Those of us inside of this room remember a time not so long ago with 38 fighter wings, with 400-plus bombers, to where we are today -- just 20 fighter wings as we claw to hang on to it and less than 200 bombers. We’ve transitioned at the same time from an in-garrison force to an air expeditionary force, so the OpsTempo and the demand signal have gone up, and they’ve gone up in seventeen years of combat operations. We’ve routinely cycled a significantly smaller force now in and out of the Middle East. This is added hours, it’s added stress, it’s added pressure to those airframes and increasingly shortens their life or the remaining lives of the exceptionally old fleets.

You know, it wasn’t that long ago that this nation came together and produced 95,000 fighter aircraft. It was for a war effort. We’re in a war effort. And then we saw by the time period of the 1980s we were still producing aircraft at a fairly decent rate -- some 200-250, upwards of 300 aircraft inside of a year for our combat air forces. F-15Cs for air superiority, F-16s modified to counter the proliferation of surface-to-air missiles. But their replacements, F-22s, built today and F-35s, hopefully tomorrow, have been severely affected by fiscal reality.

Today with less than one percent of the population actively engaged in this global war on terror, we’re looking at the next threat we find our buy of F-22s at just 20 aircraft per year, and a production line whose future is still in jeopardy. For the F-35 we anticipate production of 48 per year, significantly below what is required to get us out of the both capability and capacity [bath tub].

At the same time, F-15s, F-16s, and other aircraft are reaching the end of their service life. Air dominance yesterday, air dominance today, air dominance tomorrow, how will the strategy work? From 20 to 30 aircraft per month of the fighter side to 20 aircraft of the F-22 variety in an entire year. It’s not a viable strategy.

Meanwhile, potential adversaries continued to ramp up their production of aircraft and in the next decade we’ll see the increasing proliferation of those aircraft and those systems throughout and around the globe. My sense is our combat forces will face that ever-increasing both capable and capacity force and our dominance will be challenged. The proliferation of those aircraft and those threats dictate that we, again, have both capability and capacity to meet that threat to assure the air dominance for that joint force. Otherwise, history kind of gives us some pretty graphic examples what happens when you don’t.

When you fight a symmetrical force, there is an increased risk. And that increased risk is measured in things like lethality and costs, it’s measured terms of the lives of men and women, like who are in the back of this audience and represent our fine Air Force today. Stalemates in the Western Front in terms of World War I, point at examples of why you must maintain an asymmetric advantage, and air dominance provides that.

Additionally, the transparency of the world that we live in, with our media that’s out there. They help to frame, and in an interesting way, they help to shape the debate and the public opinion. Air dominance, in my mind, it helps the joint force achieve its objectives and do so by shortening the fight. That’s critically important.

Our Congress and the public expect that our U.S. forces, led by air dominance from your U.S. Air Force, will in fact win 99 to nothing, and not a 54 to 55 relationship. Meeting this expectation for U.S. air dominance, both in capability and capacity, places demands. Should we give up on overmatch? Not while we have an AFA. Should we cede the lead in fighter aviation and aircraft to another air force? Not while we have a U.S. Air Force.

Unfortunately, our ability to assure this air dominance has been increasingly brought into focus for us. Focus from some of the events that have occurred in the last few months of 2007. Let me give you just a bit of a today in where we are in terms of the fleet. As most of you know, on the second of November in 2007, an F-15C tail number 80034 literally snapped in two on a training mission. Let me discuss a bit about that mishap and some of the subsequent series of events that have resulted from, and what it has taught us about these fleets of aircraft.

So here are the facts. Missouri Air National Guard. Structural failure, broke apart. But why did it break apart? Frankly, as we began to dig through that we began to understand that we were extremely grateful and thankful that we got the aviator back and he wasn’t killed. We stood down 666 F-15s across the combat air forces, convened an Accident Board to learn and determinate of what was the cause. And from the beginning we wanted to be transparent about our actions, and in fact have done that. What did happen with this F-15? It was an immense effort. Partnership from across the investigation teams of Bruce Carlson from the Air Logistics Center, Air Force Research Laboratory, the Boeing Corporation, the best in terms of academia, and the staff at Langley Air Force Base.

If there was good news in this, we discovered a [inaudible] design attribute of F-15Es and as rapidly as we could we returned them to the fight. But F-15As through Ds were a remarkably different story. Maintenance crews toiled during those periods of November and December of 2007, some 26,000 hours, twelve and a half man years, to go through and inspect a series of aircraft to see what we would find in those inspections. Fifty-four hundred hours of combing through the wreckage and finally found a smoking gun, perhaps not all but at least a smoking gun -- a four inch crack, a four inch fatigue crack, in a langeron. Langerons, I-beams, structure, skeletal structure of the aircraft, but a single point failure with the consequences if it fails catastrophic like what happened in St. Louis.

Over time that fatigue crack over, over time that fatigue crack had propagated, ultimately leading to structural failure and the break-up of that aircraft and almost the loss of that airman. The langerons were not predicted to crack so no inspection procedures were in place prior to the mishap. Those procedures now exist, as does an extensive program to look at the longevity and the structural integrity of that aircraft and more. But I have concerns; we still don’t know what we don’t know about the fleet.

Look, we’ve added patches, we’ve added stiffeners, we’ve added crossbeams, we’ve put band-aids all over that aircraft and more. These repairs have shifted the stress in the airplane from one place to the other and now we need to go back and look at a fatigue test, which was done some thirty years ago, to see what are the effects. Soon we’ll conduct that new fatigue test under Bruce Carlson’s leadership and the operational impact, however, of what we find and what we found on that day of 2 November, does have significant and catastrophic effects across the fleet.

It wasn’t just a single point failure in my mind. It was a wake-up call and an opportunity to look under the hood of an aging fleet. Today we’ve done much of the inspection work. We’ve got most of our F-15s back in the air, some will never fly again. Some must be repaired before they ever fly again. And today units and aviators are getting re-qualified in as rapid a fashion as they can to support homeland defense. But it’s still going to take critical months before they’re fully back up to speed in terms of combat mission ready status, and until then, we’ve had F-15Es, F-22s, even Canadian CF-18s perform some of the homeland defense missions. It is a cascade effect across this fleet, and while they’ve been doing that, other missions in support of other combatant commanders in regions around this globe for a global power force have been put on the sideline. This F-15C incident is of great concern and it’s representative, as I said, of a systemic problem in terms of our aging fleet.

So limiting the scope, in my mind, of this problem to just simply a faulty fatigue crack and a faulty langeron in one airplane really misses the point. It would be remarkably short-sided. This is not an isolated incident, but it’s another sign that old things break in new and different ways.

Within our fighter force alone, we routinely find cracked bulkheads in the F-16. We undergo service life extensions and modifications trying to continue to keep these aircraft into the air. A-10s are requiring 242 new ship sets worth of wings so that they can remain viable and operational, not just now at the multiple decades old, but well into the multiple decades in the future.

On the 2nd of November, in my mind, we were served notice for our fleet, we were given an ability to understand what would be the cost of not performing these missions and the risk that we would obtain.

If you look at aircraft, they can at least be measured in three primary ways. One is of course going to be the usage, it’s more of a flight hours kind of a concept; another one is the physical age, the years; and then you have one that is a military utility, or usefulness. I would argue that our legacy fleet faces significant challenges in all three of those areas, both in terms of age, in terms of military utility, and in terms of physical age.

We can continue to band-aid and extend the life of our fighters, F-15s, F-16s, which were originally designed to last 4,000 hours. We’ve extended them to 8,000 hours. Is that the right strategy?

In the 1980s, when the majority of the current fighter force was built, that fleet averaged six years of age, not unlike our adversaries today. But today, even with the current production of F-22, that fighter force is going to continue to average 20 years and continue to exceed in terms of its age.

So if we open up the scope just a little bit broader and think about the ACC fleet writ large and move to the combat air force’s fleet, it’s not a 20 year old fleet, it’s a 25 year old fleet, and it continues to age. And as I discussed a little bit earlier, this does not take into account how the aircraft are currently being used or the additional stresses put on them just to survive so they can also be lethal in the current environment.

As the fleets age and are growing older, they are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Some of the people in the back of this room today represent the best that we have inside of our Air Force in an attempt to sustain and maintain these fleets, but it’s coming at a huge cost. The average cost per aircraft to maintain this rate has increased dramatically, up almost by a factor of two just inside this last decade. Every year our new problem set grows. Every day in the F-15 fleet we receive three engineering requests on how to maintain the aging fleet. Every day, three additionals. When we think about the F-15s that we put them through depot, 800 hours have been added to the work to keep F-15s viable. Is this an appropriate strategy for us to continue to pursue?

So due to the reduced military utility, the increased down time for additional maintenance man hours, our ability to achieve and maintain air dominance is increasingly put at risk. The only answer in my mind is to recapitalize and to modernize the CAF fleet. Because you see, for far too long we have bought way too much risk because we bought too little iron. If we don’t have the iron, we will not have any options.

One way to potentially begin to think through this problem is with the thought of a new Combat Air Forces strategic master plan. I’ve asked that we move our ACC strategic master plan in a new and different direction, a different direction that will be perhaps more coherent, more synchronized, and more integrated, and will include the partnerships and relationships with the others that participate inside of this Combat Air Force. Thus we’ve created a CAF strategic master plan.

We’ve begun the integration of those planning efforts and to try to move it under a single document, if we can. We’re working with our key decisionmakers, with the Chief, with Secretary Wynne. We’re working with the MAJCOM commanders that are arrayed in front of you.

How will we provide combat capability to support the tasking, to support the missions, the functions primary and collateral? We need to make sure that it’s in line with our national defense and our military strategies and it has to be consistent with the Chief’s strategy white paper and the soon to be released Secretary’s strategy paper.

This Combat Air Force strategic plan will describe the specific ends, it’ll describe the ways, it’ll describe the means required to succeed against the threat, which we believe we’ll encounter in this global environment both today and, as our title of this conference says, into the future.

The strategy will guide everything we do inside of the Combat Air Force, from articulating the strategy itself to developing operational concepts based on our core competencies and to identify required capabilities and to prioritize resources for those required capabilities.

So to give you just a peak and an insight in the current development of this, let’s talk about this definition of a CAF. Where we’ve been, what it was, where we think it should be going. Combat Air Force. What is it? Who is it? What will it look like over the next 20 years?

Currently working with the leadership arrayed in front of you today, these colleagues on trying to work the definition, but at least as we’ve begun this work we’ve come up with a few truths. Traditionally, when America thinks of the Combat Air Force, it visualizes only fighters and bombers flying through the air to destroy an adversary. Clearly, it is and will remain the tip of the Air Force spear, but the CAF is more than that.

The Combat Air Force delivers coercive effects and it does it globally and it does it through the air domain. It’s got to do it rapidly and it has to do it in any environment, 24/7/365 in a global sense. Today the CAF is the aggregate of its people, its organizations, its capabilities, and its capability to deliver global vigilance and global power for the nation and for all. It’s not just about fighters and bombers in my mind, it’s about those that maintain, it’s about those that’s serve, it’s about those that support, protect, and supply the entire CAF portfolio, many of which are represented in this audience.

A 21st Century Air Force, how does the CAF contribute? How will it operate in the air and space and cyber domains? Today the CAF has historically focused really on generating coercive effects primarily for the air domain. But as we move further into the 21st Century, this requirement for a cross-domain dominance, the seamless integration of all of our capabilities, that’s going to drive the redefinition of the CAF to all of those Air Force capabilities that deliver those coercive effects in defense of our United States and protect our interests abroad.

It’s going to be what allows the joint force commander to achieve the desired outcomes across the full range of military operations, humanitarian relief all the way through preventing war via dissuasion and deterrence to inflicting strategic paralysis on an adversary. The essence of a Combat Air Force; it has always been about combat, so let me provide some additional definition of coercion and coercive effects and capture them and how we’ll try to work that and maybe a short explanation.

Coercion, in my mind, threat of force or use of force and the air power theory as we’ve looked at this continuum, if you will, of coercion goes from deterrence on one end, and that’s really perhaps represented as Howie has talked with you about by forward presence and the threat of force. Perhaps a middle piece of coercion as we look along the continuum, called compellence, all the way to a point represented by the limited use of force or the ability to deny and eventually disable an adversary’s capabilities all the way through destruction of those capabilities. That’s the application of the brute force piece of it.

So if that’s coercion, and that’s a bit of a thought on CAF definition. Let’s think about vision and let’s think about mission in those definitions. As we’ve begun to examine these, a vision and a mission statement, here’s where we are, and it remarkably parallels what we’ve talked about today from this conference’s perspective.

Vision: a dominant Combat Air Force always. And a mission statement: to fly, to fight, to dominate from the air integrating capabilities and delivering precise coercive effects in defense of our nation and its global interests.

These statements show that we are currently the dominant one inside of our core competencies and areas leave interestingly enough two, at least, areas for further improvement. Expanding our current capabilities to meet increasing threats and those emerging threats, both those that we understand and those that we are yet to understand, while widening our aperture to better address ways to meet challenges across the spectrum of conflict.

During the Cold War, the Combat Air Force really focused on the high end of the spectrum -- major combat operations. But emerging threats and challenges through the spectrum of conflict, from stable peace to major combat operations have changed our culture and the necessity for us to change the CAF in response. This is not to say that we’ll give up on our primary function, it must always be those areas that could cause a joint force failure in a traditional conflict. Rapid strike, theater access, join air dominance, surface dominance, full spectrum battle space awareness, cyber space dominance and agile combat support.

The CAF plays both a lead and a supporting role in all of these areas and these roles will change as the Air Force expands across that cross-domain set of capabilities. The CAF cannot focus exclusively on the high end of conflict, we must continue to expand our forces on a regular and catastrophic, but also undisrupted, challenges that we face.

This will ensure we continue to support our Chief’s number one priority -- winning the global war on terror -- but still being prepared to meet the challenges of the future. It’s not just fight tonight, it is future fight.

And as I touched on earlier, the CAF’s strategic plan will describe the specific CAF ends, ways, means that are required to meet this new strategy. Not surprisingly, many of them are those that you have heard from the past like freedom of action, decision superiority, persistent engagement, persistent dominance, cross-domain dominance, and the remainder of the CAF strategic plan will define ways and means used to realize that vision and that mission. It’ll be built along three principles, three primary principles.

First, integration and interdependency will become more and more important for the future of the Combat Air Forces, both within ACC, the CAF, and I believe increasingly, inside of the Air Force. The principle recognizes that modern war and warfare is comprehensive, that it is joined, that it is interdependent, it’s often intergovernmental and multinational if the peace is to succeed.

This will also serve us well, in my mind, as we try to tackle the challenges along with our partners in Space Command and Cyber Command. The establishment of maintaining and obtaining a cross-domain dominance today and in the future.

A second principle: the need for full spectrum operations. The CAF must expand its capability portfolio to address the full spectrum of conflict from peacetime military engagement activities, building partnership, for example, to irregular warfare activities, counterinsurgency and foreign internal defense, to regaining our edge against traditional challenges of those near peer adversaries and competitors with those double digit and triple digit SAMs and increasingly a fourth to fifth generation air threat of their own.

A third principle: capture current processes and procedures and make them transparent for all and available in one place. A desire for us, as we develop this CAF strategy plan, is to have a one stop location for anyone who wants to understand what the CAF is, where it’s going, how it’s going to get there. Every airman, those in the back of the room to those that are out across this globe need to understand how and to be able to identify with where he or she fits in and how they contribute to the CAF ends, ways, and means. It’ll be a master document, a document that’ll provide the guidance for not just ACC, but to contribute to the CAF.

Finally, we need to look for opportunities to improve our current operations and we need to do that now. While planning for the future we must remain absolutely focused on the current fight. Strategic thinking provides conceptualizations that may be immediate use in our current operations to improve both the efficiency, but more importantly the effectiveness of our operations. We’re going to work in parallel, we’re going to work in the continuum, we’re going to work in coordinated efforts to build future capabilities while we modernize the current force, concepts that our CAF warriors of the future will benefit from.

So, air dominance. A bit of a history lesson from the past, a bit of where we are today in the challenges we face, and a bit of the development of a CAF strategic master plan. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It has been and it remains what? Air dominance. Why? A strategic imperative, one we must never cede to an adversary.

We’re proud of the fact that no American has been attacked since 1953 and we’ve got to and we fully intend to remain that way.

Recapitalization, it’s vital, it’s an essential priority for our air force. Not just the Combat Air Force. And we have to do it now. We need to replace these aging fleets of airplanes that we discussed in the inventory and that will become more important with each passing day, but we have to be smart about the way we do it and how we’re going to go about doing it. We have to identify what the mission areas are that are most dear to us and those missions that we can get help with.

Air dominance. It’s about an Air Force. It’s about a Combat Air Force. It’s about what’s core and what must be secured and can continue to be secured. We’re going to develop that CAF strategic plan. It’ll put ultimately a guide for the development of systems and provide operational capabilities required to secure those national interests.

This is where I’m going to solicit your thought and your input. It’s where a part, that I want you to be a part of the planning process as we develop. I want you to inform that process so we can make it better, to achieve the effectiveness and the efficiencies necessary to provide the capabilities. Show us how these future systems integrate within and outside of ACC and the Combat Air Forces. Propose the systems that will be dominant in the operation, from the insurgencies to the high end conflict, all the way to and through our near-peer competitors, so we can ensure that we can win not just the fight tonight, but the future fights. I will continue as my colleagues will on the front row to welcome your participation in this as a CAF team during its execution and development.

So with that as an air dominance past, today and in future, thank you for the opportunity to address the audience. Thanks.

[Applause]

Moderator: Thank you General Corley. Perhaps unfortunately for our speakers today, nobody has to approve our questions, so let me start you out with probably the number one concern of many in this audience that I talk to every single day, and that is there’s a public perception that it’s only the Army and the Marine Corps that are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and that the Air Force is just there and not doing very much. Can you give this audience some examples of some of the successes that we’re having in combat overseas?

General Corley: Mike, perhaps first we should start from a global perspective, because this is about global power. We talked about forward presence. There are bombers present in Guam today. Why? Because we worry about an adversary in a North Korea; and we worry about a Pacific theater where there are growing near-peer potential conflicts that may begin to challenge interests of the United States.

We worry not just about a North Korea and, if you will, a consecutive bomber presence; we worry about a threat in terms of Iran and its growing capabilities. We worry not just about a North Korea, a Pacific, a China, an Iran, we worry about an Afghanistan where we have an unblinking eye with continuing presence of unmanned aerial systems and other fighter aircraft represented, for example, by the F-15E, that are delivering kinetic effects today.

We think about an Operation Iraqi Freedom. And if we think about this continuum of the time period of OEF and OIF, some half a million sorties delivering the kinetic effects to enable the achievement of objectives have occurred.

Then we bring ourselves all the way back to the United States. Defense of the homeland remains job one. Just since 9/11, 50,000 sorties have been flown in Operation Noble Eagle. When we think about other commands, ICBM missiles to deter other adversaries spread across a land mass the size of Pennsylvania. Busy times for a busy force, that both achieves effects on its own, the targeting of an adversary, like Zarkawi, or deters other adversaries. Those are just some examples of what your Air Force is doing on a daily basis.

Moderator: Thank you. As we looked at the budget, the Chief mentioned yesterday that we’re buying ninety-some-odd air planes, 93 airplanes, I think he said, in the ’09, in the President’s budget request this year, and as we do the math, that’s clearly not enough to even begin an adequate replacement program for the fleet we have.

The Air Force also came in with a very high number for unfunded requirements. Can you talk a little about those unfunded requirements in your area that you’d like to see?

General Corley: One, you have to have a viable strategy and a viable strategy shouldn’t outfit a force from a set of unfunded priorities and it shouldn’t have a viable strategy underpinned by trying to achieve your force structure from supplementals. You have to understand what is the size of the force that is a strategy responsive force.

From a strategy responsive force we need to provide that best uniformed and military advice, and then others will determine how much risk is to be accepted.

I would argue right now we’re way into the red line on the acceptance of risk. If I were to argue I would say we need a hybrid solution in terms of our modernization and our recapitalization. I would take existing production lines and I would ramp them up to the degree that they’re facilitized so we can begin to achieve economic order quantities in terms of fighter aircraft. I would take that existing force structure that in partnership with Bruce Carlson we find is still viable for the future, and I would both modernize its capabilities, I would look to integrate it with some of those other advanced platforms -- F-35, F-22, new bomber, B-2 bomber -- to additionally provide leverage to them.

So it’s a hybrid solution -- modernize, recapitalize, enhance the economic opportunities that are available to it, and not try to do it on the cheap inside the supplementals.

Moderator: A question from the audience. The Air Force is moving into the total force arrangements with many of its partners with the Guard and Reserve, especially, for example, the F-22 at Langley. So the question is, how is it going? Are there missions in the future that you see this limited by? Or are we going to proceed to expand the program that’s already been outlined?

General Corley: One, the total force initiatives have been a huge success from my perspective. We have moved ourselves very far from the old thought process that a reserve component was a strategic reserve. We’ve moved them towards an operational reserve. In many respects, they are well equipped to do that.

Let’s look in some specific areas where we have associations. At the present time we’ve gone from a program of record for unmanned aerial systems, specifically the Predator. The program of record says that we would have 12 CAPs. Today we are at nearly twice that number of CAPs. We would not have been able to do that absent the participation of our Guard brothers and sisters. They’re uniquely qualified, they’re very capable, and when you think about remote split operations, that’s something they can provide that 24/7/365 contribution to.

When I think about associations, both the classic and other associations. When I think about opportunities up in Vermont as far as basing, highly successful. My vision of the future is that’s a growth industry. There’s more and not less in terms of leverage of our reserve component brothers and sisters.

Moderator: This next one’s pretty complicated and I think you partially addressed it during your talk, but there’s, for the retired community and industry there’s a though and a question that in the recapitalization of the force, how did we get to where we are? In other words, you mentioned risk, but there had to be a series of decisions across a number of administrations in Congress and other places. How do we wake the American public up to the nature of what we’re facing?

General Corley: Mike, I hope that’s one of the charters and the purposes of the institution of the AFA. I think that’s why you have the individuals on the front row that have been attempting to articulate the message along with our Chief and our Secretary in that public domain.

How did we get here? The simple phrase I used during my prepared remarks was too much risk, too little iron. We made some bad assumptions. When you have an accident like what we had on 2 November, it causes you to go back, recircle on the analyses, question what those assumptions were.

When we bought an airplane that we spec’d for 4,000 hours and then through analysis said it was at 8,000 hours, and then when we have a fleet that exceedingly in equivalent service and spectrum hours as far in advance of that, we need to go back and challenge those assumptions.

It’s not a fault-focused approach. I’m not about going back to try to blame others for decisions that they made. They too were forced to make tough decisions inside a fiscally constrained environment. But now we have the benefit of some new news and now that we have that new news we need to chart a different strategic plan to be able to resolve it.

Moderator: The last question, General Corley, as we look to the future, and I mean way out to the future, is it time that we started thinking about designing airplanes that last 50 years or 60 years? What we’re seeing today, is that going to continue into the future so that we ought to look at platforms that are available for hugely extended periods of time?

General Corley: I think what you need to do is not have there be a calendar-based entity. What you want to do is try to design a vehicle, if you will, to accomplish a mission, and you want that vehicle to have a certain set of attributes.

When some argue that an F-22 is a throw-back to the Cold War, or try to say it was specifically designed for one specific purposes, that’s wholly and patently untrue. An F-22 was designed to be lethal, it was designed to be survivable, it was designed to be supportable. A combination of enduring attributes is what I would focus on in terms of future aircraft.

Moderator: General Corley, those of us in the audience and those of us at AFA want to thank you for your service and your time this morning. We very much appreciate your thoughts.

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